Researchers on variance bounds tests of stock price volatility recognized early that risk aversion can increase the volatility of prices implied by the present-value model. This finding suggests that specifying risk neutrality may induce a bias toward rejecting the present-value model insofar as...

Why are the prices of stocks and other assets so volatile? Efficient capital markets theory implies that stock prices should be much less volatile than actually observed, reflecting an unrealistic assumption that investors are risk neutral. If instead investors are assumed to be risk averse,...

This paper employs a standard asset pricing model to derive theoretical volatility measures in a setting that allows for varying degrees of investor information about the dividend process. We show that the volatility of the price–dividend ratio increases monotonically with investor information...

We study optimal exercise by mortgage borrowers of the option to default. Also, we use an equilibrium valuation model incorporating default to show how mortgage yields and lender recovery rates on defaulted mortgages depend on initial loan-to-value ratios when borrowers default optimally. The...

The manager of a firm that is selling an illiquid asset has discretion as to the sale price: if he chooses a high (low) selling price, early sale is unlikely (likely). If the manager has the option to default on the debt that is collaterized by the illiquid asset, the optimal selling price...

We develop an equilibrium model of illiquid asset valuation based on search and matching. We propose several measures of illiquidity and show how these measures behave. We also show that the equilibrium amount of search may be less than, equal to or greater than the amount of search that is...

We define rational bubbles to be securities with payoffs occurring in the infinitely distant future and investigate the behavior of bubbles values. We extend our analysis to a setting of uncertainty. In an infinite horizon arbitrage-free model of asset prices, we interpret the money market...